It's that time again when I climb the scale and share the outcome of the last 6 weeks. I lost 7 lbs, putting me at 190.5 lbs. It's a 3.54% drop. Check out the Status page to see its relative position.

I wish I could say I earned it, but frankly, I didn't do much as my training remains in a free fall—how its metallic clank echoes down into the coffers of a late night. That said, the past two Expeditions mark the greatest combined percentage loss of any other duo since my becoming a carnivore.

What was the shape of The 23rd Expedition?

• 28 lbs of Ground Beef;
• 14 lbs of Beef Liver;
• 4-6 lbs of Fish;
• 112 Eggs;
• 28 tbsps of Dried Egg Whites;
• 30+ sticks of Butter;
• 300+ cups of Coffee.

"I'm Strictly Plug-and-Play, I Ain't Afraid of Y2K"

While I previously hosted my domain email with ProtonMail in Geneva, I made the switch to Berlin's TutaNota at €12/year, a price point that is persuasive for a guy that just wants privacy in this digital age of ubiquitous snooping. While I must be missing its branding's German significance for it sounds Polynesian to me, I do say I respect its clean interface. And I gotta admit, it's FUN sending an encrypted message to a Gmail recipient!

I tried getting back to Windows 10, but just felt...icky, as I was removing all that closed-source, corporate gunk that clogs the lines. I thought I might try anyway, in preparation for Windows 11 release to the public in October. I was curious as to whether the new version would move on or embrace all the bloatware I was removing via bloatbox and PowerShell wizardry. Yeah, no surprises here: "Get in my belly!"

I decided to look up to see what features Windows might deliver in this release; Microsoft made my eyes roll back so hard that I nearly knocked myself out! I can't get past words like "safe" and "inclusive" without audibly blurting out a nonsensical syllable in disbelief. Linux, yes, but Windows? WAIT, we're talking about factors that have NO relevance to things of a technical nature—like being closed source while chock-full of zero-day exploits with a guest key for the NSA to kick their heels up on the sofas of OUR computers...gotcha, so "features" with no actual bearing on a decision for implementation? I see what's going on here: just more politics. Well, I like safe and inclusive ribeye as much as the next guy, I guess. Just make sure its medium rare, ok?

Last night, I gave the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) a whirl. I gotta admit, I get frustrated by Big Tech's tendency to own my device, making it difficult by default (if not impossible as I look over at my iPad's updated to a desolate bog) to remove apps. And it's not something that's central to the functionality of the system, either! It's dumb stuff—like an Internet browser of all things! While I'd love to replace the os altogether like I did years ago for an iPod Nano, between my evading Google logins and using other app stores, adding the ability to delete everything I want makes my phone start to feel like my own, instead of merely borrowing a service. This is the kind of stuff I did last night.

I love the fall. This season is hardly a new topic as I wrote a year ago with October 3's I Remember You (with bonus credit applicability for me today) and again, EXACTLY TODAY, three years ago in 2018.

Autumn is magical. I feel a rush of something BIG that's tantalizingly close—just right around the corner, that I'm going to do something special. Thus far, this has translated into my autodidactic tendencies snacking on a couple scoops of physics with a slice of calculus—though I REALLY need to get back into Python for a Gnucash replacement. For the past couple of weeks I got pretty heavy into a strength of mine, WWII—it got me to thinking: I ought to concentrate into a subject for awhile before I continue to bounce around the disciplines (see my LibraryThing account) .

Today itself had inviting weather and that ol' wind motioned for me to hit the open road. At one point, I found my hair unfurled with opened windows as my car tore down a well-worn path from the 90s behind Easthill—I felt I was 18 again, running my paces back home as I blared the soundtrack to Top Gun...

...I felt alive!

I pulled up to my childhood home and parked on the street like I did nightly with my old 1979 Ford truck in 1995 and 1996. For a moment, I could see everything as it once was...until my eyes saw how my mailbox was missing its flag. It snapped me out of the enchantment. I drove on.

My intention is that today will be the first of many new days to get outside and train. Will I shape it as such? As it has been sung, "In all the good times I find myself longin' for change..."

...and I make my return to Spotify. Yes, in yesterday's post, I brought up my tension with the platform—that hasn't changed, yet I recognize how music compels me forward. Sadly, my Expeditionary playlists cannot be recovered (and I don't know if approximated will be sufficient), but I can begin anew with The 24th kickoff on Thursday!

One of the compelling factors in this adoption are my discovery of additional Spotify clients. While tonight I gave Spot a try, I wanted something even further pared down and went with a CLI version—so very COOL! It makes me feel like I'm back in 1996, playing a .WAV file for my DOS bootup on my old 486 running at 40 MHz. It's an app I had to compile from source: ncspot. I took a screenshot of a theme I was throwing together for it:

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It's got all the zip of an FTL drive AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, there's NO GUNK taking up my screen's real estate! I cannot highlight that enough! The Internet for as long as I can remember has been like a poorly managed town regarding land zoning and signage. That was the big draw of early Google—clean...minimal. I still like that—I've never changed.

Some sort of change will be coming down the line regarding the theming of this site. I'd like to revisit synthwave/retrowave. Earlier, I reworked the JavaScript for the countdowns to get rid of the months, though visually the countdowns remain spartan.